Michael Collins - The brass rainbow

On any given block between Third Avenue and Avenue A there may be a Polish Hall, a Slovenian Roman Catholic Church, an Italian cafe, a Bodega-Carniceria, and a Jewish restaurant. There are lower-middle-class tenements, flophouse hotels, apartments with doormen, and some of the lowest rooming houses anywhere. There are spit-and-sawdust workmen’s bars, psychedelic coffee houses, and three places where you can buy marijuana over the counter.

At the moment, St. Marks Place itself is a hippie heaven, a far-out Coney Island of the flower-children and the LSD-trippers. Every night is Mardi Gras on this year’s St. Marks Place. It will not always be this. It will change again with the city and life itself, and no one can say what it will be tomorrow.

And underneath the surface carnival of today, the old Ghetto, Bowery, and melting pot still holds firm, offering a home to men like Sammy Weiss, who have never known peace and who love only the dollar made without work.

Weiss’s room was on the third floor rear, and it was not locked. I went in with caution. The room was empty. With its nameless furniture, greasy stove, and sagging bed, it looked like it had always been empty. The single closet held one suit, one pair of slacks, and one worn pair of shoes. In the bureau there was underwear, socks, and a strange article that seemed to be an old male corset. There were two clean shirts with turned collars.

All men, petty gambler or king, are much the same day to day. I could picture Weiss, of the fur collar and big bluff, alone in this room turning his shirt collars and hoping that a corset would make him slim and young again before he gave up and let his pot sag.

I found nothing. Only the evidence of a small and empty life. There were only some twenty-seven miles between this room and North Chester, but it was hard to believe that the two places held members of the same species.

I heard the door open. I looked up to see a man come in and lean against the door. A gray man, tall and slender.

“Hello, Fortune.”

He wore a gray cashmere overcoat, pale gray gloves, and his gray trousers draped perfectly to shined black shoes. He wore his gray Homburg at too much angle, and his handsome face had an edge of anxiety he would never completely hide. It added up to only one conclusion-a man who lived by wits and guile, and for whom clothes, pleasures and the best places were not by-products of life but ends in themselves. A con man.

“What do you want to make waves for, Fortune?”

“Looking for Weiss is making waves?” I said.

“Big waves,” he said.

“You’re Paul Baron?”

He had an odd way of looking at some point on a far wall. He looked at a wall and nodded. “I’m Paul Baron. You’re getting in my way, Fortune.”

“Enough to be pushed under a train?”

Baron considered the ceiling. “That was a bad play. Spur-of-the-moment, you know how it is. It seemed like an idea at the time.”

“What is it?” I said, and stepped toward Baron. “You want to silence Sammy before he can finger you for killing Radford?”

I suppose I stepped toward him to show him that I wasn’t afraid of him. If I did, it worked fine, but not with exactly the result I had had in mind.

Baron said, “Leo.”

A second man appeared in the open doorway. A short, broad man with enormous, dangling hands, and massive shoulders like the hump of a bull buffalo. He shambled into the room on short, stiff legs that seemed to have no knees, and watched me with blank-faced concentration.

Baron studied a stain on the far wall. “Now listen good, Danny boy, and then forget what you heard. A man owed me money. I’m an easy-going man, but I like to be paid. This man couldn’t pay me, but he had an uncle who could. I sent Sammy Weiss to collect my money. Weiss got my money, but I didn’t get it. I still don’t have my money. I want it.”

Baron let a silence hover in the room as if to give his point time to sink in. I could hear the rasping breathing of Leo the buffalo.

I said, “You know, it’s strange, but I’m having trouble seeing Sammy Weiss with the nerve to cross you.”

Baron sighed. “Let’s try it once more, okay? I sent Weiss for my money. Something went wrong, I guess, and Sammy panicked. He killed Radford. I don’t care about that. But it seems like Sammy figured if he had to run he could use $25,000 to pay his way. That I care about. Now you go ahead and help Weiss on the murder rap, but after I get my money. Right now I don’t need you nosing around. Check?”

“The money is evidence in a murder, Baron.”

“Sure. That’s why I need it before anyone finds Weiss. I’m doing Sammy a favor. They won’t find the money on him.”

“You’re sure they’d find it on him now?”

He looked straight at me for the first time. His eyes were pale gray like the rest of him. Barbarian eyes under the veneer.

“You’re a bug, Fortune. A hard-head bug. Leo!”

The buffalo-man was on me before I could even start to think of moving. He was behind me with my arm in one hand and the back of my neck in the other. My neck isn’t thin, but Leo’s hand held it like a clamp on a pipe. Baron stepped to me.

He took a hypodermic syringe from his pocket. Leo held me as immobile as a strait jacket. And Leo had more than muscle; he knew what he was doing. He held me so that if I moved hard my arm would break, and maybe my neck.

I looked at the syringe and wondered if this was my last day. I didn’t want it to be my last day. Not now, not ever. But there was nothing I could do. I had no chance at all to fight. None. Like a Jew going to the gas chamber. That is a terrible moment.

“Just relax, Danny boy,” Baron said.

He rolled up my sleeve and shot me in the vein. He grinned into my face and massaged my arm. I waited. Leo’s grip did not relax. After a time I felt the sleep coming. I hoped it was sleep.

When my knees sagged, Leo picked me up and laid me on the bed. I raised up and swung at a shadow. I hit empty air. Something pushed me back flat on the bed. I breathed.

Leo leaned close. A hand slapped my face, hard. Leo went away. He had not spoken once. Maybe he didn’t know how.

I hoped it was sleep.

I lay in dim light on something flat. I saw a window high in a gray wall. There was darkness beyond the window. A barred window. I saw a washbasin and a toilet. Only three walls. The fourth wall was vertical bars.

I sat up. I stood up. My legs were shaky. I wondered what Baron had fed me. It had the feel of morphine. I didn’t want to think about why it had been morphine. I sat down again to let my legs steady and my head clear. The cell looked like a precinct cell. I reached for a cigarette. I had none. The men in the other cells heard me moving.

“Hey, junkie, you gonna get hung.”

I had the urge to get up and pace. I resisted. The one thing you never do in a cell is pace. Every minute would become an hour. What you do is lie flat and think about something with many, many small parts-like a walking trip across the city, step by step.

“Sweat, junkie!”

Everyone has to hate something. But the shouts told me that I had been found on Weiss’s bed with the syringe and makings. In another cell a man began to whistle flat and off key. Voices echoed:

“Shut up!.. For Chrissake shut it off!..”

Somewhere someone began to cry. I wondered how good a fix Baron had hung on me. I guessed that he had not wanted to kill me because of the risk. A push under a train is one thing, a killing in a room where Baron could be placed is another. The whistler down the corridor didn’t stop. Detective Freedman was at my cell door before I heard him.

“You got real trouble now, Fortune.”

“I’m no junkie. You know it’s a frame.”